The 4-year-old barbecue chain's Bloomfield restaurant has moved to a new, larger location where it has gone upscale. And its owners are planning to use the new prototype to expand the three-restaurant chain in the next five years.

``This is like Wild West meets the East,'' said Vinnie Carbone, who owns the restaurants with cousin Tony Carbone, business associate Marty Fox and two silent partners, Arthur Anderson and Phil Schonberger.

``It's like the Wild West was, but you never saw it that way on TV,'' Tony Carbone said. ``This is no yippy-ki-yay cowboy. It's meant to be for the Easterner.''

The new restaurant in Wintonbury Mall, which opened Tuesday, is triple the size of the original location on Jerome Avenue and has four times the seating capacity. Intimate dining rooms, each with different decor, and a saloon-style bar seat as many as 225 patrons and a banquet facility in the back can accommodate more than 150.

But aside from more space and cushy booths, the new spot flaunts deep green, burgundy and blue paisley and Victorian-style wallpaper in combination with Navajo borders. Bear and bison heads still stare down at the customers, but the primary wall decorations are prints and reproductions of historical Western characters in gold-tone frames.

The first W.B. Cody's restaurant, which was called W.B. Cody's Bar-B- Que & Grill, was more like a Southern rib joint. The building it occupied, now being foreclosed on, could squeeze in 90 customers, including 10 spaces at the bar. Tony Carbone describes it as rustic or ``cap gunnish.''

But when the owners opened a second W.B. Cody's restaurant in Glastonbury in 1992 and a third in Westerly, R.I., in 1993, the decor became more and more stylish. Now, they want to take their restaurants a step further. And along with a more upscale look, they are diversifying their menu for more rounded appetites.

Vinnie and Tony Carbone, who also have ownership interest in Carbone's Ristorante and Gaetano's Ristorante in Hartford, say they've done everything they can with a rib. On the old menu customers could choose from 15 types of barbecue and a half-dozen other items, such as catfish and grilled chicken.

Now they will have less rib selection -- just six types of barbecue items -- but more than twice as many other choices, including six or seven pasta dishes, more chicken, and salads and sandwiches for lunch. In January, the restaurant also will begin serving its own Cody's Blond Ale, made by a local brewery.

Vinnie Carbone said that while there will always be a call for beef, customers are not eating red meat as much as they have in the past.

``We were looking at how our neighbors and friends eat,'' he said. ``And meat is not an everyday thing.''

The new menu is being transferred to the other two restaurants and will be used at future sites in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

So far, the new concept has worked. Business at the Bloomfield location is already up 4 percent over last year's.

The Carbones hope that trend will continue, especially as they develop new restaurants in the future. They expect to open a new W.B. Cody's this summer and two more every 1 1/2 years after.

The new restaurants will not necessarily be cookie-cutter images of the one in Bloomfield, but they will carry similar ``successful cattleman'' themes. Tony Carbone said they may be slightly smaller than the prototype, around 6,000 square feet rather than 8,600 square feet, but will also be located in spaces formerly occupied by other restaurants. W.B. Cody's moved into space formerly occupied by K.B. Wintonbury Restaurant.